ThoughtFarmer 4.0: Social Intranet Meets Document Management

Collaboration Meets Doc Mgt

ThoughtFarmer's latest release takes a few steps back from the recent rush to socialize everything. Instead, it focuses on ensuring that ordinary workers can combine as teams or departments to work via a firm document management system correctly and efficiently first, then they can use the social intranet features to perform work tasks better.

Combining a SharePoint connector, a Word-to-Web converter, online editing and analytics package, ThoughtFarmer 4.0 is an on-premises solution designed to offer enterprises a companywide intranet all with the usual directory, profiles, organisational charts and other essentials.

Working Smarter Together

Workers can use the suite's document management features and social features to build company knowledge, create and manage projects and collaborate. Calendars and blogs can be created and teams or groups can work together on documents that can be edited live online.

Behind the basic tasks are two ideas -- the first is to turn workers into contributors and authors by making it easy for anyone to add their own two cents (or hundred bucks), as demonstrated in the video.

Then, with enough contributions, the company can see where its star players are and read the social context between divisions and departments to find better ways of working together. Good ideas should come to the surface and deficiencies can be identified.

Social Intranets are the Future

If a company adopts ThoughtFarmer, or other modern collaboration intranet products like HyperOffice, there are some logical benefits -- one person doesn't just email another, instead the whole team can remain informed without workers feeling harassed by often irrelevant emails. Once this type of communication becomes natural, issues small and large become more visible and can be dealt with faster.

Improvements on the existing product include usability and performance improvements, as well as faster and higher quality PDF production. If you're interested, there is a live demo taking place on December 1st at 10:00 Pacific, you can register for that here. For a wider perspective, see our piece on collaborative intranets.